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How coronavirus is affecting Ole Miss' football recruiting plans for 2020 and beyond

OXFORD — When first-year Ole Miss football coach Lane Kiffin under-signed recruits in December and February, no one could've foreseen that an international pandemic was going to derail his grand plan.

As of National Signing Day on Feb. 5, Ole Miss signed 16 high school or junior college players for the Class of 2020, as well as one graduate transfer and one traditional transfer. Most teams try to sign around 25 players per recruiting class, using up as many available scholarships as possible. But Kiffin opted to pocket a bigger-than-usual number of remaining scholarships to use in the transfer market after spring practices, applying an "NFL model" of roster management to the college system.

But, as it has done in so many ways over the last month, the coronavirus pandemic has altered Kiffin's plan. With Ole Miss' spring football schedule postponed indefinitely, Kiffin said mining the transfer portal for talent will be a tougher task than previously expected.

"The big part of that, wading in the transfer market, is do you have a great feel for your own players?" Kiffin said. "Not having any type of spring would definitely hurt that because there’s an open book with all your players. Start from scratch. You end up thinking a position group’s better than other people thought it was. Or not. Then you kind of go to free agency from there. That would hurt us."

Losing a self-evaluation period isn't the only thing inhibiting Ole Miss' recruiting efforts in the transfer market. On National Signing Day, Kiffin said he expected to see the transfer portal fill up "after spring" when players have a better idea of if they should expect playing time in the fall.

When fewer teams have spring practices, fewer players get weeded out and opt for the transfer market. And with fewer players in the market, it's less likely that Ole Miss will be able to find the right players to fit what it might be looking for.

Coronavirus is also affecting what Ole Miss can do to build its future recruiting classes. The SEC has indefinitely shut down all on-campus recruiting and isn't allowing coaches to travel for recruiting visits either. This limits Kiffin and his staff to making phone calls, evaluating tape and re-organizing boards in a time when they'd usually be able to host camps and individual visitors.

Kiffin said he isn't even sure if there will be a spring recruiting sessions when everything's done.

"It’s hard to figure out until we get some more information on it," Kiffin said. "But with the early signing period, to lose spring and to lose official visits, we were planning on having a lot of official visits spring game weekend with the great weather and great atmosphere and trying to get kids around during the baseball season and all that stuff. That was kind of our plan to move things up."

Ole Miss only has three players committed for the Class of 2021, all of whom committed before Kiffin was hired in December. A few players have reported scholarship offers from Ole Miss during the shutdown over the last two weeks, but few players have committed anywhere, let alone Ole Miss.

It's an even playing field in that regard. Ole Miss isn't disadvantaged by not being able to host recruits because no one else can either.

That said, this might be a situation where signing among the fewest number of recruits in the SEC in 2020 comes back to hurt Ole Miss more than it expected.